"For me, there is neither past nor future in art. If an artwork cannot live always in the present, there is no point in wasting time on it. The art of Ancient Greece or Egypt and of the great masters who lived in other eras is not an art of the past. Perhaps it is even more alive today than it has ever been."

Painted on 20th August 1956, La danse provides a truly vibrant "tableau" of Picasso’s unique lifestyle, artistic approach and style of that critical time in his extensive career. In terms of personal life, his ten-year relationship with Françoise Gilot ended in 1953, leaving a void in Picasso’s love life which was quickly filled by Jacqueline Roque who remained his partner until his death in 1973. Shortly after fellow artist Henri Matisse, whose oeuvre had been a constant catalyser for Picasso’s own artistic production and vice versa, passed away in November 1954. A few months later, Picasso acquired his own property in South of France in April 1955, the legendary large villa overlooking the Mediterranean Sea near Cannes, La Californie. With regards to Picasso’s career, an important retrospective exhibition of his works took place in Paris and in Germany in 1955-1956 and by July 1956, Picasso was already preparing with Alfred Barr at La Californie his future blockbuster retrospective exhibition at the MoMa held in 1957. Most importantly, La danse was painted at the core of his production of Variations, encompassing Picasso’s personal reinterpretations of specific masterpieces of art history: Les Femmes d’Alger of 1863 by Eugène Delacroix (1954-1955), Las Meninas of 1656 by Diego Velázquez (1957) and Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe of 1863 by Édouard Manet (1959-1961). Throughout his oeuvre, one of Picasso’s main sources of inspiration besides Antiquity and tribal art were landmark Old Master paintings, from Cranach to Cézanne. Unsurprisingly, he focused on this dialogue with art history’s key players at a mature stage in his career, to fuel his creativity but also to challenge art history, to secure his place in the lineage of the great masters of art and to even go beyond their achievements to lead art towards new directions. Yet after the success at the 1956 Cannes Festival of Henri-Georges Clouzot’s revealing documentary about Picasso’s revolutionary creative processes in The Mystery of Picasso, the artist’s production until the end of summer 1956 was relatively slow in terms of drawings and paintings comprising only of a series of highly simplified and stylised drawings representing branches, plants, flowers and insects (Zervos, vol. XVII, nos. 123-150) produced between 17th and 28th June. He turned towards ceramics and prints instead, producing around thirty ceramic tiles with faun heads early August. It was only on 20th August 1956 that Picasso had a peak of inspiration realising six paintings on that same day, including the present work La danse in addition to La maison dans les palmiers, La famille, Devant le cabanon, Les loisirs and another La danse (Zervos, vol. XVII, nos. 151-156), the latter having disappeared since it was stolen from the Museu Chacara Do Céu, Rio de Janeiro in February 2006. These six masterpieces are all stylistically reminiscent of his decorative flora and insect drawings executed a couple of months earlier. Characterised by an earthy palette of browns, greens and blues, these works fall within Picasso’s heritage of Spanish painting. The figures and motifs are defined by spontaneous thick brushstrokes of black paint set against a background hinting to La Californie’s fancy architecture and garden. The highly gestural and simplified style in these six paintings bear witness to Picasso’s awareness of the rise of Abstract Expressionism, namely Hans Hartung and Pierre Soulages’s 1950s paintings, contrasting with the complexity of his Femmes d’Alger compositions. At the same time, the fluidity of his black brushstrokes reveals an Oriental touch, caught between Chinese calligraphy and arabesque. In that way, Picasso defies artistic conventions by underlining the painting’s two-dimensionality, reducing his figures and compositional elements to silhouettes, as if paying tribute to the cut-outs of his friend and rival Matisse, executed during his final years. The title itself of the present lot, La danse, also brings to mind Picasso’s mutual artistic exchange with Matisse, in terms of subject matter, resonating and simultaneously challenging the latter’s masterpiece of the same title commissioned by Sergueï Chtchoukine in 1910. Despite its rather dark hues, Picasso expresses ajoie de vivre in La danse, which he had expressed through his art following the end of the war in 1945 and which he incarnated in his monumental composition entitled La joie de vivre in 1946 (Antibes, Musée Picasso), a visual parody of Matisse’s 1906 masterpiece. Yet dance and music have been leit motivs in Picasso’s oeuvre since his early 1890s cabaret paintings, given his fascination and collaboration with the circus and ballet worlds, befriending the Medrano Circus performers and choreographers Léonide Massine and Sergei Diaghilev, as well as producing costume and stage designs for a total of ten ballets in the 1910s-1920s. He continued to explore the dance theme through mythological topics in the 1940s and 1950s, always looking back at the way in which Old Masters, namely Nicolas Poussin, tackled these subjects to re-interpret them in his own unique pictorial language. Moreover, Picasso fuelled his visual vocabulary with the theme of bacchanals, traditionally representing drunken women euphorically dancing around their leader Dionysos, the Greek God of wine and theatre, celebrating the pleasures of life. The Minotaur being his alter ego in the 1920s and 1930s, Picasso turned towards "merrier" Greco-Roman mythological heroes such as fauns, satyrs and bacchanals in the 1940s and 1950s, that were more in line with his peaceful state of mind during the post-war years and his more frequent - and ultimately permanent - stays in South of France. In addition, these bacchanal scenes provided him with a pretext to delve back into the world of dance and to quench his fascination with the body in movement. The spontaneous brushstrokes and simplified composition of La danse seem to capture a specific moment in time, and the fact that it is one of six works painted on the same day, translates a sense of urgency in the artist’s execution. With the musician sitting in the foreground in La danse and the two jovial bacchanal-like figures – scratched in the black paint by the artist - dancing in the background, Picasso creates his own myth and mystery, continuing his endless dialogue with art history and revealing his inner feelings.